all the madness and malfeasance

Sometimes at night, I stood at my window and looked out at the ice on the meadow and the barn roof and thought not just of Henry Kaufman and the torment he’d brought upon us, and Lucy, and who knows how many others, but of all the madness and malfeasance in the world beyond our rutted road. I understood the haunted look Sheriff Heath so often wore. To take a stand against it—to try to save one wronged girl or put a thief or murderer behind bars—would have been like trying to stop a locomotive with a patent leather bridle. I wondered what made the sheriff think he should even try. - Amy Stewart, Girl Waits with Gun